Yoko Ono's Most Famous Performance Art Piece Cuts Both Ways In Los Angeles The Art Newspaper International Art News And Events

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Yoko Ono's Cut Piece found a new register in downtown Los Angeles, where artist MPA turned the landmark performance into a quiet but unnerving study of trust, vulnerability, and collective restraint.

Presented at Redcat on Sunday, the work was commissioned by the Broad, which is currently showing Ono's traveling retrospective Music of the Mind through October 11. MPA began as Ono did in the original 1960s version: seated in silence, fully clothed, with scissors placed nearby. The performance ended only after audience members had cut away the last of her clothing.

What unfolded in between was less chaotic than the premise might suggest. The danger was present from the start - scissors, a still body, a room full of strangers - but the audience largely answered that tension with care. Participants knelt or crouched to make small cuts, returned the scissors to the floor gently, and in one case even offered a piece of their own shirt in solidarity. The atmosphere made the work feel less like a spectacle of exposure than a live experiment in mutual aid.

MPA, a queer artist known for collaborative practice, wore a sculptural black gown by Aliona Kononova and heels by United Nude. Before the performance, she explained that Cut Piece has never had a single fixed score. Ono has framed it differently over time: as an inquiry into gendered violence in the 1960s, as a peace offering when she last performed it in 2003, and later as a meditation on vulnerability in a post-9/11 world. MPA also read Ono's 2008 statement about personal exposure, including her reference to Rachel Corrie and the media's relentless assault on the senses.

The performance's emotional center came in its final gestures. MPA quoted Ono's line,“My body is the scar of my mind,” then added her own:“My body is made of (g)rapes&vines”. The phrasing sharpened the work's central tension: the body as site of injury, but also as a place where care can be staged, tested, and sometimes briefly made real.

In a moment when audience participation is often treated as a formal device, MPA's Cut Piece suggested something more fragile and more difficult - that a crowd can still be asked to choose between harm and protection, and that the answer is not always predetermined.

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